- Good day there, Peter Moriarty here.
In this video, I wanna cover the danger
of using Slack for business
and in particular, Slack's free plan.
(upbeat music)
Now we've worked with thousands of small businesses
over many years and it's true that small businesses owners
wanna be productive and the most savvy small business owners
look for new technology to actually
improve the way they're doing things,
improve their communication
and Slack has been one of those tools
that has been absolutely brilliant for that.
Not only does it connect your team with instant messaging,
it's easy to use and it's got tons of great integrations.
And what I love about Slack is that,
it's actually brought many businesses
into the realm of instant messaging,
Where for years we were using Hangouts
or we were using Facebook Messenger
or you were even using Skype
in the old days for that kind of stuff,
Slack's made it really easy and accessible for everyone.
But Slack has a dark side and that is that businesses
are putting business data into Slack,
and sometimes that data can be held hostage.
Let me tell you about how that works.
Typically a business owner will sign up for Slack
because they've being preferred by a friend
or a business colleague or someone says
"Hey, Slack is great," and you set it up
and roll it out to your team, everyone starts using it.
Now it's fun, you get involved in the Giphy wars
and you set up different channels for your team
and everything is going swimmingly.
And while you're on a Slack free account
you're thinking "Hey, this is awesome."
Slack is great and it is an excellent tool.
Now, the challenge comes when you put
more and more business data in Slack
there is a limit to the free plan,
and that limit is currently 10,000 messages.
So that means is, after you hit more than 10,000 messages
in your Slack account, the old ones aren't deleted
but you just lose access to them.
And so, think of like a kinda rolling limit
on how far back you can go in your search.
And let me tell you with 100% certainty.
Every single customer that uses Slack will at some point,
find themselves needing to go back into their history.
You need to run a search find a bit of information
oh, you know what, I sent that to someone in Slack
but it was more than six months ago
and it's past the 10,000 message limit.
And what happens then is you're stuck.
You can't go back and search that far,
because you've lost the 10,000 messages.
And I know that for a fact because this happened to me
when we were running Slack as well.
Now what happens at that point is you have to pay
for Slack not just for one user
but for all of the users and not just for a month,
but for the whole year.
Effectively, you're held hostage in that,
you have a gun to your head and you've got to pay
for this whole Slack account just to get access
to that little bit of data.
Now what some business owners say is,
"Okay, well I'll just kinda forgo that and you know
"we'll just soldier on and we won't worry about it."
But personally, I think that's a pretty big risk
to the business.
Now if you're in financial services,
if you're in a healthcare business
or if you're in a business in Australia
more than $3 million of revenue,
you need to comply with Australian Privacy Principles.
And what that means is that you need to have access
to all of your business data.
It's not good enough to say that if you're using Slack,
and it's hidden away (laughs)
you know, I can just always pay
for it to go back to it at a later date.
No, you need to have access
to all of your business information and not only that,
you don't wanna have to potentially lose information
and be slogged with the cost later on down the line,
to switch on your account.
Now, what's the solution?
Well if you're already a G Suite user
and most of our audience are,
then you have access to Hangouts chat.
And Hangouts chat is the new rewrite of Google Hangouts
and effectively, it's a bit of a copy of Slack.
Now Hangouts chat came out a couple of years after Slack.
Google were a little bit slow to the party.
Slack had a good five-year lead in building up
a great application but then Hangouts chat effectively
went and copied all the features.
So you've got all the features
that you've been used to, inside of Google Hangouts.
You've got things like threaded conversations,
you've got channels for different members,
you've got instant messaging between each other,
you've got GIPHY integrations,
you've even got integrations with some of your favorite
apps like Asana but also the AI elements of Google
like their automatic scheduling tool.
You even have integrations with Google Drive
and Hangouts Meet, Google's hangout video chat program.
And what that means is that if you're already using
G suite, you don't need to bother with Slack
and so my opinion is is that if you're on G Suite
right now, there's absolutely no reason
for you to be using Slack.
Google does everything that Slack does and of course,
you get access to all of your history without getting
held hostage and having to pay for yet another app.
So, if you're on Slack right now and you wanna make
the switch over to Hangouts
and you'd like some help making that happen,
then you can get in touch with our team,
head along to www.itgenius.com.
Or if you're worried about your particular integrations
working or you need some help with custom integrations,
then be sure to let us know and we can investigate
what's happening with your current account right now.
If you wanna learn more about Google Hangouts chat,
we've got a great video on that and I'll drop a link
to that below this video.
Until next time, cheers.
(upbeat music)